Uzbekistan in 2007

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The main political question of 2007 in Uzbekistan was whether or when there would be a presidential election. Pres. Islam Karimov had exceeded his constitutionally allotted term in office, and there was considerable speculation inside and outside the country on whether he would have his tenure extended indefinitely (as had Pres. Saparmurad Niyazov in Turkmenistan) or content himself with manipulating the choice of a successor. By September an election date of December 23 had been set, and in November delegates at a Liberal Democratic Party congress selected Karimov as their presidential candidate. He went on to win the election with 88% of the vote and thereby secured a third term in office. Karimov faced only token opposition, and many Western observers questioned the legitimacy of the vote.

Throughout 2007 the Uzbek leadership sought to reverse the country’s worsening economy. In February President Karimov told his cabinet that Uzbekistan urgently needed to expand its output of oil and natural gas and to improve the tax-collection rate by fighting the “shadow” economy. The population had been driven to rely on the shadow economy by Karimov’s earlier restrictions on the import of consumer goods, which the country could not produce for itself. The import restrictions, however, remained. Throughout the year various officials called for increased domestic and foreign investment in the Uzbek economy. In late March, Foreign Minister Vladimir Norov asserted that the Uzbek economy was stable and growing and that foreign investment was increasing. In August the Uzbek authorities liquidated the long-running Uzbek-U.S. Zeravshan-Newmont gold-extraction joint venture and handed its assets to a local firm; this action did not send an encouraging signal to potential foreign investors.

Uzbekistan was only partially successful in its efforts to persuade the European Union to relax sanctions imposed after the Uzbek government refused to permit an independent investigation of the violent events in Andijan in 2005. The international human rights community lobbied hard against relaxation of the sanctions, which were extended in May. The country’s record on the observation of human rights remained poor: human rights activists were regularly harassed by the police, arrested, and imprisoned, and there was little evidence that an effort was being made to end the torture of suspects by law-enforcement officials.

The world’s attention was drawn to Uzbekistan on October 24 by the murder of independent Uzbek journalist Alisher Saipov. Saipov had published a political weekly highly critical of Karimov in the Kyrgyz town of Osh, near the Uzbek border. Kyrgyz Ombudsman Tursunbai Bakir-uulu expressed the view of many journalists and others when he said on October 29 that he believed Uzbek special services were behind the killing, but Kyrgyz law-enforcement officials said that they could find no evidence to support that conclusion.